Entries in children
(3)

In less than a minute, software can predict what a child will look like when he/she grows up.

Developed by the University of Washington and funded by Google and Intel, the software automatically generates images of a young child’s face (photos that begin at age 5 work best) as it ages to age 80. This is the first fully automated approach for aging babies to adults that works with variable lighting, expressions and poses.

The software corrects for tilted faces, turned heads and inconsistent lighting, then averages thousands of random Internet faces of the same age and gender, and they are applied to the child's face to project his/her againg face.

The renderings are so good that they are hard to discern from real photos.

The researchers hope the software can factor in ethnicity, hair whitening and wrinkles in the future.

Children's fingerprints disappear faster than those of adults because fingerprint staying power is based on the amount and types of oil in the skin.

Using a collection of latent fingerprints given by six father (ages 35-45) and son (ages 7-10) pairs, researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory watched for chemical changes over the course of four weeks. Twice a week, one fingerprint from each participant was dusted, lifted and analyzed based on the number of features visible. At the same time, a non-invasive synchrotron technique called Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy mapped the location and makeup of the skin and sebum in the prints.

At all points in time, the fathers' prints dusted darker than those from their sons. In fact, the fathers' prints remained virtually unchanged during the four-week study, while the fine features of their children became increasingly more difficult to see.

FTIRM showed that adults produce more sebum than children, which leads to darker prints, and the composition of the lipids, or fats, in sebum differ significantly between adults and children.

The results could pave the path toward more advanced fingerprint detection techniques.